The pharmaceutical executive, who was arrested last week on charges that he misled investors in a hedge fund and used stock at another company to cover the losses, has been fired as CEO of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, a small drugmaker that Shkreli took over last month.

KaloBios said Monday that it terminated Shkreli last Thursday, but it did not give a reason. It also said Shkreli had resigned from the company's board. Shkreli had been CEO of KaloBios for only a month, after buying a large stake in the company in November.

The move marks the second high-profile departure for Shkreli, who has been widely seen as the poster child for pharmaceutical industry greed and callousness. Last week he resigned as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, a startup drugmaker that caused a furor when it bought a half-century-old lifesaving drug, Daraprim, from another company and raised the price by about 5,000 percent overnight.

Daraprim, sold exclusively through Walgreens under a deal with the Deerfield-based pharmacy retailer, is a treatment for toxoplasmosis, a rare parasitic disease that can cause severe brain damage and death in people with compromised immune systems, including those with AIDS.

Shkreli has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of the securities and conspiracy charges.

The U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn, N.Y., said the charges were unrelated to his activities at Turing, and covered the time he was head of a small hedge fund several years ago and then as CEO of biosciences company Retrophin, which fired him last year and sued him for improperly using company funds to cover losses at his hedge fund.

But Shkreli apparently sees it differently. He told The Wall Street Journal that he was targeted by authorities for his drug price hikes and his over-the-top public behavior.

"Beating [me] up and then trying to find the merits to make up for it — I would have hoped the government wouldn't take that kind of approach," Shkreli told the newspaper. The U.S. attorney's office did not respond to those comments.

Shkreli has refused to apologize for jacking up the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a dose, and told a drug conference that he would like to have raised the prices higher to please his investors. He had also said the price hike would help the company develop new drugs.

Shkreli, 32, picked up the nickname "pharma bro" for often appearing in public wearing hoodies and sneakers, taunting critics on social media and making public comments about his efforts to get dates with celebrities.

He told the Journal that he planned to tone down his behavior, saying it had been "a bit of an act."

A version of this article appeared in print on December 22, 2015, in the Business section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "`Pharma bro' Shkreli fired again - 2nd high-profile departure for exec arrested last week" —
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